MBD-02 The Normative Perspective: God and His Word

Children can be very amusing, especially when they try to learn and apply new ideas. The other day, my friend’s four-year-old daughter came up to him just before dinner with a piece of candy in her hand and said, “Daddy, let me eat this candy.” Now, she was not normally allowed to have candy before a meal, so her father asked her, “Why should I let you have that candy just before dinner?” And she responded with great bravado, “Because I said so.”

Now, it’s obvious that this little girl had learned her response from her parents. So, she naturally expected her father to obey as soon as he heard those magic words, “Because I said so.” But this little girl did not understand a fundamental fact about human communication. The authority of commands and directives depend on the authority of the person saying them. Although the little girl used the same words as her parents, she had to obey because her parents were speaking, but her parents did not have to obey because she was speaking.

As we explore Christian ethics, we must come to grips with this fundamental fact: the authority of moral principles is derived from the person who has said them. Why are we to submit ourselves to the instruction of Scripture? Why do the moral guidelines of the Christian faith have authority over us? The answer is straightforward: These directives have authority because they come from God who has all authority. We obey him “because he said so.”

This is the second lesson in our series on Making Biblical Decisions. In this series, we’re focusing on the process the Bible teaches us to follow as we make ethical decisions. We’ve entitled this lesson “The Normative Perspective: God and His Word.” And in this lesson, we’ll begin to explore the question of authority in ethics, or to be more precise, the authority of God and his Word in ethics.

In the preceding lesson we saw that making ethical decisions as Christians requires that we consider three basic matters: the proper standard, the proper goal, and the proper motive. We also designated these considerations the normative, situational, and existential perspectives in Christian ethics. To make moral decisions that please God and lead to his blessings, we must look at matters from a normative perspective by focusing on relevant standards or norms. We must also look at matters from a situational perspective, making sure that we have assessed the relevant facts and outcomes of a situation responsibly. And we must look at matters from an existential perspective, making sure that we have proper purposes and motives. In this lesson, we’ll take our first look at the normative perspective — the proper standards for ethical decisions — by concentrating on the standards of God and his Word.